By Count Friedrich von Olsen
This week, the Senate confirmed, narrowly, Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. The vote of Vice President Mike Pence was needed to break the 50-50 tie, the first time in the nation’s history that a Cabinet secretary’s confirmation required a vice president’s tiebreaking vote to succeed…
As a Republican, I am heartened that our president was able to prevail with his appointment, in which two Republican senators voted with 48 Democrats/Independents to create the deadlock that Vice President Pence had to break. Nevertheless, I am not all that enthusiastic about Ms. DeVos…
To be sure, I have some things in common with Betsy. We are both Republicans and we are both billionaires, or more accurately, multi-billionaires. She has some ideas on education reform I certainly agree with. For example, neither she nor I are in the same camp with teachers’ unions, which irritatingly equate the quality of education with how much teachers are paid. She certainly has some ideas with regard to school choice that I can embrace. Nevertheless, there is one element of her approach to education – and school choice – with which I take exception: charter schools…
I will acknowledge, from the outset, that my view of charter schools may be warped by my geographical location, here in San Bernardino County. The simple and sad fact is that a fairly large number of San Bernardino County’s charter schools have been run by charlatans who have exploited the students attending them, their parents and all the other children and parents in the districts where these schools were set up, since they tapped into money that would have otherwise have been available for legitimate education…
The most egregious example of a charter school swindle in San Bernardino County, or perhaps anywhere, is that of the California Charter Academy, founded by Charles Steven Cox. After he suckered the Snowline-Joint Unified School District into establishing the California Charter Academy’s first campus in 2000, he managed to expand the California Charter Academy into the largest charter school operator in California, with dual sponsorships by Snowline and two more charter sponsorships, one from the Orange School District in Orange County, and one from the Oro Grande School District. To exploit these non-profit charter schools he simultaneously set up Educational Administrative Services Corporation (EASC), a for-profit company which was then hired by all four charter schools to manage the day-to-day operations of the charter schools and provide academic supplies, charging inflated rates. By 2003, California Charter Academy teachers were publicly complaining that students’ educations were being neglected and books and other educational materials were not being provided. In 2004, the superintendent of the California Department of Education, Jack O’Connell, brought in an auditing firm, MGT, which eventually determined that $23 million in taxpayer money paid to the private management company Educational Administrative Services Corporation was misappropriated, with dozens of Cox’s family members and friends having been hired into what were essentially do-nothing clerical and non-productive administrative positions. Millions upon millions of dollars went to non-education related expenditures, unless you happen to believe that luxury automobiles, boats, accommodations in Las Vegas and at Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel, studio musical recording equipment, spa visits, fishing trips and jet skis are somehow related to education. Ultimately, 147 yet outstanding criminal charges against Cox and his associate, Tad Honeycutt, who set up two shell corporations similar to EASC to get in the action, were filed by the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office in 2007. That case has yet to go to trial…
Two years later, Cox was back, and in conjunction with former [and later indicted and convicted] San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, then-Hesperia School District board member Anthony Riley, Peggy Baker (Cox’s sister-in-law), then-San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, Mitzelfelt’s field representative Jessie Flores, indicted [and later convicted] former assistant assessor Adam Aleman and indicted local businessman John “Dino” DeFazio, he set up the Adelanto Charter Academy in 2009, getting its sponsoring charter from the Adelanto School District. They then set up two for-profit corporations, Educational Development, Inc. and Professional Charter Management, Inc., with which they looted the charter school operation seven ways from Sunday until in May 2011, when the Adelanto School District revoked Adelanto Charter Academy’s charter. They then filed two sets of appeals on that revocation to the county superintendent of schools and then the California Department of Education. When those entities similarly refused to let the academy continue, they shut the operation down. This time, instead of making off with $23 million, Cox and his confederates were able to line their pockets or endow their bank accounts with just $3.1 million…
In the Chino Valley Unified School District, Sue Roach, an award winning and respected educator and the principal of that district’s best performing school, in 2010 was entrusted with $3 million of the district’s revenue to create Oxford Preparatory Academy. Roach had spectacular success with her academic formula, which heavily relied upon parent participation, converting Oxford Preparatory into the highest performing school in San Bernardino County in terms of student scores on state standardized tests. In time, however, Ms. Roach sought to cash in. Taking a leaf out of Cox’s book, Ms. Roach created her own for-profit company, Edlighten Learning Solutions, which then was given a contract to serve as Oxford Academy’s “charter management organization,” which called for ten percent of Oxford’s revenues to be diverted to Edlighten for that service. Between January 2013 and June 2016, Oxford Preparatory paid Edlighten $4.2 million. After the Chino Valley Unified School District took stock of what occurred last year, it refused to renew Oxford’s charter, and the academy is now flitting from educational agency to educational agency, including the county superintendent of schools and the California Department of Education, all of which have so far turned it down in its attempt to stay in operation beyond May 2017…
In March 2015, Excelsior Charter Schools made an ugly public display when it conferred severance packages upon former superintendent Bill Flynn and former assistant superintendent of student services Melinda Stackelhouse. Unofficial reports were that the severance packages Flynn and Stackelhouse received were $635,000 and $298,000 respectively when they made their departure from Excelsior the previous month. Excelsior is chartered under the authority of the Victor Valley Union High School District, serving students in grades seven to twelve. It consists of five schools, two in Victorville and one each in Phelan and Barstow as well as in Norco in Riverside County. On February 19, 2015 Flynn and Stackelhouse resigned, but no indication was given as to why. Their lawyer maintained they were due the remaining amount under the nearly four years unexpired in Flynn’s contract and the nearly two years remaining in Stackelhouse’s contract…
On November 30, 2015, the Adelanto School District’s board of trustees, in support of Superintendent Edwin Gomez’s recommendation, voted unanimously to deny Debra Tarver’s application for the charter renewal of the school that had been installed two years previously at Desert Trails Elementary School following a “parent trigger” takeover there. Debra Tarver, the owner/operator/progenitor of the LaVerne Preparatory Academy, came in to serve as the “director” at Desert Trails, which underwent a name change to Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. Superintendent Gomez cited “flaws” in the way Desert Trails Prep was being operated, including a lack of academic achievement, inadequate academic testing and action bordering on or crossing into the arena of a financial conflict of interest, when Tarver shifted governance to Ed Broker’s Educational Services, a company which Tarver owns. The district cited Ed Broker’s Educational Services as being the governing corporation for LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, founded and also owned by Tarver, located in Hesperia. Tarver received a salary of $100,000 per year from Desert Trails to serve as the School’s CEO/executive director while she was devoting a third of her time to Desert Trails Preparatory Academy, a third of her time to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy and another third of her time to the LaVerne Academy’s corporate function…
Last summer, 13 months after Jared Mecham, the founder and former director of Hope Academy, resigned as director on April 14, 2015, state auditors found what they say is evidence that Meecham exploited the trust of the parents of students in the Morongo Valley Unified School District, which had sponsored Hope’s charter, by misappropriating more than $900,000 in public money. Red flags had been raised from the outset, when Hope Academy commenced operations during the 2011-12 fiscal year as “a non-classroom-based learning environment” serving students in the Morongo Basin, revolving around a resource center which opened in Yucca Valley in August 2011. Once comfortably established, Hope Academy expanded operations in several adjacent counties and districts located in San Bernardino, Kern and Riverside counties without the district’s express permission or knowledge, despite a requirement that any proposed expansion for a new independent study resource center outside the district’s boundaries would be explicitly communicated to the Morongo Valley District. In addition to the money Meecham made off with, auditors also came across multiple fiscal irregularities, questionable expenditures, nepotistic arrangements and inappropriate related-party transactions at the charter school…
I was not a product of the American public school system myself. Until I was ten years old, I was educated by my governess. My only real taste of public school was a short period when my family moved to Denmark and I was obliged to enroll in school there in what, as best as I understand it, would translate into the American equivalent of the fifth grade. I had something of a hard go at it. By that age, I could speak four languages, but alas, Danish was not one of them, although there were enough cognates with German that I was able to understand every fifth or six word or so. In a few weeks I adjusted. Subsequent to that, I did a few stints in some boarding schools, two on the Continent and one in Scotland. Of course, University came later. But I digress…
The point here is, I believe education is important. And while I am not enthusiastic about turning the whole business over to teachers who are represented by unions that are more dedicated to the welfare of the teachers than they are to the education of students, I am also skeptical of turning the education of our future senators and engineers and doctors and shipping magnates to self-serving educational entrepreneurs more interested in enriching themselves than in arming the generation that will soon be coming into its own with the wherewithal they need to serve themselves and others. I hope that Betsy DeVos will not neglect to reform the charter school system with the same vigor she has committed to remake the public school system…